Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds

I will say that in my college classes, the first thing I always do is to download the PDFs of the recommended books to accompany the classes.

Every once in a while one of these books ends up being awesome and truly useful for the class, and then I order it physically because I actually want it in my bookshelf (admittedly I'm not battling poverty).

Such shadow libraries have driven me to buy the books I liked, while rarely opening and reading the ones I didn't need, and also not buying them. It's just like having a "demo" version of a book but without the anxiety of running out of pages.

I think it's already hard enough to engage young people in reading and being into books but without websites like this I think it would be nearly impossible.

That's exactly my use case. Every single time I read (not totally as reading from a regular screen is not for me) a book from a PDF and I like it I definitely purchase a physical copy. I do the same if I hear an album that I like. Imagine like spending 150U$S on a book and it turns out that the approach is not for you. Every book is different and so are readers. What might be a good read for me might not necessary apply to other readers. Z-Lib and Libgenesis are a bliss and hope they are never taken down.

There also good resources like: annas-archive, libgen, and the good old sci-hub.

For paper management Zotero + https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub plugin makes browsing google scholar very efficient.

Also Calibre fulltext search with OCR-ed PDFs:

https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

makes learning a concept/finding test exercises even easier.

Soon a local LLM to "RAG retrieval on my library" might be the next step.